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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > February > 04 > Entry
City Day’s practice tests
Want to see how closely questions from City Day Community School’s practice tests matched questions that appeared on Ohio Achievement Tests? Take a look at a few examples:
From City Day’s 7th grade practice test:
5) Mr. Munson asked Giovonte to draw a rhombus on the board. Giovonte drew a picture that looked like a slanty square. Ke’Nara went to the board and drew a square. Who was correct?
() Both, because a rhombus and a square must have at least four sides.
() Giovonte, because a rhombus must have one pair of parallel sides.
() Both, because a rhombus must have four congruent sides
() Ke’Nara, because a rhombus must have right angles.
From the 7th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
2) Coral was asked to draw a rhombus on the chalkboard. Coral drew a square. Ken told Coral that she didn’t draw a rhombus. Coral responded, “A square is a rhombus.”
Which statement supports Coral’s reasoning that a square is a rhombus?
A. A rhombus must have at least four sides.
B. A rhombus must have one pair of parallel sides.
C. A rhombus must have right angles.
D. A rhombus must have four congruent sides.
From City Day’s 7th grade practice test:
19) Aneyshia reduced her soda pop intake from 12 ounces to 4 ounces. What will happen to the volume of the soda pop can?
() The volume triples.
() The volume doubles.
() The volume is reduced to one half the original.
() The volume is reduced to one third the original.
From the 7th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
22) The Burton Company produces cylindrical barrels. If the height of a cylindrical barrel is reduced from 12 feet to 4 feet, what will happen to the volume of the barrel?
A. The volume triples.
B. The volume doubles.
C. The volume is reduced to one half the original.
D. The volume is reduced to one third the original.
From City Day’s 7th grade practice test:
7) Montasia surveyed 19 of her classmates about the hottest record labels. The graph shows the results.
Ice Age: 4
Cash Money: 5
So So Def: 10
Montasia’s class is representative of the whole City Day Community School. What is a reasonable estimate for how many of the 300 students in the school like Ice Age records?
() 65 students
() 100 students
() 75 students
() 125 students
From the 7th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
4) Manny surveyed 24 of his classmates about their vacation plans. The bar graph shows the result.
Visit Friends or Family: 10
No Plans: 6
Travel: 8
Manny’s class is representative of the entire school. What is a reasonable estimate for how many of the 300 students in the school have no vacation plans?
A. 50 students
B. 75 students
C. 100 students
D. 125 students
From City Day’s 7th grade practice test:
1) Bad Boy Records has a formula to determine the cost of producing records.
C = 3.15 + 0.25r
where C is the cost of producing a record and r is the number of records.
What is the cost of producing 12 records?
() $3.15
() $5.65
() $4.10
() $6.15
From the 7th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
A shipping company uses a formula to determine the cost of shipping a package:
C = 2.79 + 0.38p
where C is the cost of shipping and p is the number of pounds.
What is the cost of shipping a package that weighs 8 pounds?
A. $2.79
B. $3.04
C. $5.21
D. $5.83
From City Day’s 6th grade practice test:
20) What is the largest number that divides both 12 and 30 evenly?
() 2
() 3
() 6
() 12
From the 6th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
24) What is the largest number that divides both 12 and 30 evenly?
A. 2
B. 3
C. 6
D. 12
From City Day’s 6th grade practice test:
12) What number equals 0.20 x 0.4?
() 0.080
() 0.80
() 8.0
() 80.0
From the 6th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
1) Which number equals 0.25 x 0.3?
A. 0.075
B. 0.75
C. 7.5
D. 75.0
From the 6th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
17) Regina buys hair products and styling books at the store. She uses the expression 6h + 12b to find the cost of what she is buying, where h is the number of hair products and b is the number of hair books she buys.
Use the expression to find the total cost of 4 hair products and 5 hair books.
() $27
() $54
() $78
() $84
From the 6th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
19) Andrew buys books and videos in a store. He uses the expression 6b + 12v to find the cost of what he is buying, where b is the number of books and v is the number of videos he buys.
Use the expression to find the total cost of 4 books and 5 videos.
A. $27
B. $54
C. $78
D. $84
From City Day’s 6th grade practice test:
6) Estimate the area of a floor that will be covered by a piece of carpet that is 65 x 7 square feet.
() 75
() 350
() 500
() 450
From the 6th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
5) Square floor tiles will be put on a the floor of a school hallway. Each tile is 1 foot by 1 foot. The hallway is 85 feet long and 8 feet wide.
About how many tiles will be needed to cover the floor of the hallway?
A. 95 tiles
B. 100 tiles
C. 200 tiles
D. 700 tiles
From City Day’s 6th grade practice test:
Which expression shows the equivalent expression using the associative property? 6 x (a x 8)
(6 x a) + (6 x 8)
(6 + a) x (6 + 7)
(6 x a) x 8
6 x (8 x a)
From the 6th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
7) Sarah used the associative property to find an equivalent expression to 5 x (a x 7)
Which expression to Sarah use?
A. (5 x a) + (5 x 7)
B. (5 + a) x (5 + 7)
C. (5 x a) x 7
D. 5 x (7 x a)
From City Day’s 5th grade practice test:
15) Al-Maajid has a box of 30 Yugi cards. There are 15 red cards and 15 blue cards in the box. Al-Maajid pulls out a card, records the color and returns the card to the box. After pulling 10 times, he has recorded 6 red cards and 4 blue cards.
Which statement describes whether the results are reasonable?
() It is reasonable because both 6 and 4 are close to 5.
() It is reasonable because 6 is more than 4.
() It is reasonable because he will not always get 5 red cards and 5 blue cards.
() It is not reasonable because he did not pick enough cards.
From the 5th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
17) Janet has a box of 30 cards. There are 15 blue cards and 15 green cards in the box. Janet pulls out a card, records the color and returns the card to the box. After pulling 10 times, he has recorded 6 blue cards and 4 green cards.
Which statement describes whether the results are reasonable?
A. It is reasonable because both 6 and 4 are close to 5.
B. It is reasonable because 6 is more than 4.
C. It is reasonable because she will not always get 5 blue cards and 5 green cards.
D. It is not reasonable because he did not pick enough cards.
From City Day’s 5th grade practice test:
16) Shanise covered a floor with a rug. Which unit describes how large the rug was?
() Inches
() Feet
() Square feet
() Cubic inches
From the 5th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
19) Bob covered a floor with a carpet.
Which unit of measure describes how much carpet he used?
A. inches
B. feet
C. square feet
D. cubic inches
From City Day’s 5th grade practice test:
18) Stephanie writes each letter of her name on a separate index card as shown.
S T E P H A N I E
She puts all the cards in a bag and randomly pulls out one card. What is the probability that the card is an “E”?
() 1/2
() 2/7
() 2/9
() 1/9
From the 5th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
22) Beverly writes each letter of her name on a separate index card as shown.
B E V E R L Y
She puts all the cards in a bag. She randomly pulls out one card. What is the probability that the card is an “E”?
A. 1/2
B. 2/5
C. 1/7
D. 2/7
From City Day’s 5th grade practice test:
7) Kelly has $17. She bought a shirt that costs n dollars. She now has less than $2 remaining. What inequality represents the situation described?
() 20 - n > 2
() 17 - n < 2
() n - 17 < 2
() n - 20 > 3
From the 5th grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
2) Roberto has $20. he bought a soccer ball that costs m dollars. He now has less than $5 left. Which inequality represents this situation?
A. 20 - m < 5
B. 20 - m > 5
C. m - 20 < 5
D. m - 20 > 5
From City Day’s 3rd grade practice test:
8) Goldie Lock’s hair is 10 feet long. it grows 3 feet each week. how long will Goldie Lock’s hair be at the end of 3 weeks?
() 15 feet
() 16 feet
() 19 feet
From the 3rd grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
18) A tomato plant is 7 inches tall. it grows 2 inches each week. How tall will the tomato plant be at the end of 3 weeks?
A. 9 inches
B. 10 inches
C. 13 inches
From City Day’s 3rd grade practice test:
2) The chart shows the number of books Ms. Maurer’s class read during the week.
keiton 3
Shantaya 3
Ashley 2
Jamaris 3
Norman 4
What is the mode for this set of data?
() 4 books
() 3 books
() 2 books
From the 3rd grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
24) Nine students gathered data bout their fathers’ shoe sizes.
Shoe size: 8, 8, 8, 9, 9, 9, 9, 10, 10
What is the mode for the data they collected?
A. size 8
B. size 9
C. size 10
From City Day’s 3rd grade practice test:
7) A number minus 10 equals 25.
Which number sentence shows this?
() n - 10 = 25
() 10 - n = 25
() 25 - 10 = 15
From the 3rd grade math Ohio Achievement Test:
46) Monica has 18 books. She shared some books with a friend and had 12 books left.
Which number sentence could be used to find the number of books Monica shared?
A. 18 - n = 12
B. 12 - 18 = n
C. 18 + 12 = n
Permalink | Comments (22) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, City Day Investigation, Testing
Comments
By Terri
February 11, 2007 12:57 PM | Link to this
Stressed - are you speaking about the OAT or the OGT? I teach 10th grade math and have proctored the OGT. So I know that test well, I’m not as familar with the OAT.By stressed DPS teacher
February 8, 2007 7:23 PM | Link to this
Terri, I have seen the tests and although I cannot speak for last year and this coming year, there were questions on the tests that had been released and reused. I have known teachers to put up a practice question one day and the next week it was on the test. It has been a practice in the past. As Scott said, only the field test questions have not been released. And although I have never counted to find out the number of multiple choice and extended response/essay questions, there are a lot of questions that require a student to write rather than color in a circle.By Terri
February 8, 2007 3:47 PM | Link to this
Scott I just checked the ODE website and they specifically say that the old OGT test questions released will not be used again. This disclaimer is not present for the OAT questions available on the web site. So they could still be used, but I very much doubt it.By Scott Elliott
February 7, 2007 9:42 PM | Link to this
Terri, I don’t think that’s correct. Thanks to a parent’s lawsuit about 8 years ago, the state started making nearly all the questions from state tests available for public inspection at the end of every school year. A handful of questions that are being “field tested” for use on a future exam are not released. The rest are there for anyone to see.By Terri
February 7, 2007 6:58 PM | Link to this
DPS teacher - the state doesn’t release “live” questions on the website. It only publishes old questions that will not be reused. The OGT (and I think the OAT) are still primarily multiple choice with a handful of short answer and extended response questions.By stressed DPS teacher
February 7, 2007 1:42 PM | Link to this
Keith: I did not say there could not be any cheating. What I said was that it would most likely have to be with individual teachers, not a school-wide situation. I have seen instances where individual teachers were accused or even in one case, seen, cheating on a test. As a matter of fact, I reported the cheating teacher. I myself was accused by an over-zealous administrator of “helping” the students with the test. This was many years ago, long before the stakes were so high. Luckily for me, I had a proctor, someone I didn’t even know, that vouched for me saying they had not left the room during testing and I had done nothing to assist any students. We do use old tests to practice, mostly for how to answer questions as opposed to what to answer. As Scott said, there is no way to know exactly what is going to be asked. The tests now have very few multiple choice questions that would be easy to show a child what to mark or change the answer for them. Most of the tests now require the students to write and explain how they came up with their answer. I have always wondered why the state releases the tests when they are still using the questions. What would stop a teacher from practicing with questions from the web site the day before the test and then finding the same questions on the test?By Scott Elliott
February 6, 2007 8:16 PM | Link to this
There is no test from last year. The Ohio Achievement Test was given for the first time at these grades in 2006. Before that, kids took the Ohio Proficiency Test, a completely different test. So the only publicly available state study guide for these achievement tests were practice tests available on the state website. We’ve looked at those and the questions on them are nowhere near this similar. One other point. Different state standards are tested each year. For example, 4th grade math might have 24 standards. That’s too many to test kids on all of them in any given year. So the state rotates which standards are tested over three years. As a result, last year’s test may cover eight standards and this year’s test might cover eight completely different standards. The cycle repeats every three years. So if you have studied last year’s exam, it may be little or no help to prepare you for this year’s test.By Twill00
February 6, 2007 6:14 PM | Link to this
What I would like to see is the closest match to the questions on the prior year’s test. It strains credibility to think that these questions were just randomly similar to the current year’s test. However, if you could put last year’s questions beside them and they were also similar, then this could be just a valid variation of the prior year’s test. It is totally legal to copy the prior year’s test for preparation - it is the normal method of preparing students.By jeanh
February 6, 2007 2:19 PM | Link to this
Educators cheating, doing something underhanded, illegal? What could be the reason? Maybe they wanted the students to feel good about themselves or maybe they wanted to save their jobs. Priests, Pastors, Business leaders, Politicians cheat so why not educators? It sets such a great example for the young.By Lodie
February 6, 2007 10:02 AM | Link to this
The fact that this article was printed and there is an investigation going on does not make me question the test prep itself. It makes me question if other schools in the district, especially charter schools, are using the same test prep tactics, just haven’t been caught yet! Will there be further investigations in other schools to verify the validity of their scores versus test prep? Maybe then test security isn’t the issue. It seems to me that there needs to be a protocol to follow for test prep guidelines.By keith
February 5, 2007 10:11 PM | Link to this
If stressed dps believes there are no violations of security for those tests in her school district, I have a bridge. It’s my opinion that there were violations with tests and testing. Students will say the darndest things about what happened at the school they used to be in. When there’s lots of pressure to raise test scores, test scores get raised somehow.By stressed DPS
February 5, 2007 8:08 PM | Link to this
I have been a teacher in DPS for much longer than NCLB and these be-all, end-all tests. I have never been in a building where there was anything less than the strictest security measures taken with the tests. Obviously, there are opportunities for individual teachers to falsify tests but unless students are tested in front of cameras to record everything said and done, I don’t think that is completely avoidable.By Nick Alexander
February 5, 2007 12:08 AM | Link to this
Under copyright, there has to be a signifigent change from the original, and if an original is clearly able to be acerted, then it must be credited. as to 12 and 30, they reduce to 223 and 235, which shows they are meant to be easy numbers, though that they both match is a bit of a stretch, and with the other similarities, many which are too close to dismiss, (and some are far enough on their own to dismiss if not for the others), it shows the person had to either have the answer in front of him and not really know how it really works, or knew really well what he was doing, but then again, it was the same person that asked how the volume of a can changed if a person drank less, with it seeming insignificantly different from the official question. (though is is of note, 2,3, and 5 are the first three prime numbers, it doesn’t mean that 12 and 30 were obvious pics. 18 and 30 would have been just as likely in a random setup.By Scott Elliott
February 4, 2007 7:22 PM | Link to this
As it states in the story, Ohio releases the prior year’s achievement test on its website every July 1. The test questions at issue here were top secret in March of 2006 but available for public inspection in July 2006.By New World
February 4, 2007 5:29 PM | Link to this
Question: are these test questions unreleased or questions that are previously released and could be from practice test. I mean strange how they jumped so high on their scores, but I am confused on whether or not the questions are from a test that was never released. It seems to me if she were cheating she would at least also change answer C to D.By Keith
February 4, 2007 2:31 PM | Link to this
The concept of Greatest Common Factor being a question with few choices from which to build a practice test is not valid. Try 15,25; 18,27; 18,36; 15, 45; and many others all are numbers within range for 5th and 6th graders to understand the composite factors possible for those pairings. I noticed in going through the practice test that the more difficult the concept being tested and the highest the level of comprehension being assessed the more likely the letter for the synthesized test matched the correct letter on the actual state test… … .The media and newspapers should have noted drastic changes in school scoring such as this for grade levels as well as school buildings and districts in the area when everybody went out of academic emergency rating. Odd, isn’t it that so many jumped. But the observers should have noted these ‘strange’ jumps in performance for groups and raised flags.By Oldprof
February 4, 2007 11:16 AM | Link to this
Some people honestly believe some of these questions were not copied? I guess if you never tried to create a test, you might think so—or if you were so seduced by the false promises of charter schools that you’re blinded. The state tests are subject to cheating in all venues—public also—which goes undetected; this time somebody got caught. It indicates a need for more enforcement (or less state-mandated testing, which as currently done is invalid, expensive and useless as a measure of student learning).By Scott Elliott
February 4, 2007 10:29 AM | Link to this
Two points. I think the reproduction of the questions in the paper is too light. The question is 9 divided by 3 plus six times five. The correct answer is 33. The division sign may look to some like a plus sign because it didn’t reproduce well. On the Beverly question, that was a typo on my part. To show these questions on the blog I had to re-type them. I’ve double checked with the actual exam and now fixed the blog post so Beverly is spelled right. The correct answer is 2/7. Sorry for the confusion.By Keith
February 4, 2007 10:10 AM | Link to this
The Beverley question has Beverly spelled differently in the sample space. I hope that was Scott’s typo… not as done on the OAT itself??? If so the answers are wrong…By Samkon Gado
February 4, 2007 10:05 AM | Link to this
This is silly. A lot of these questions are phrased the way they are because there aren’t a lot of ways to quickly rephrase that question. They aren’t (for the mostpart) identical. The GCD of 12 and 30 question isn’t unreasonable. 12 and 30 are probably common examples, and once you have picked that question, the answer set is very limited. I have greater concern about the questions that don’t have a correct answer: The B E V E R L E Y question should have a correct answer of 3/8, yet that isn’t an option (1/2, 2/5, 1/7, 2/7) [I’m guessing someone who has the name Beverly created the answerset] Also, on the cover of the DDN there is the question: Simplify 9+3+6x5 The answers given are A)5 B)6 C)33 D)45. None of these are correct. 9+3+6x5 -> 9+3+30 -> 42.By Jacqay
February 4, 2007 10:00 AM | Link to this
I really think you are making a stretch to consider some of these controversial. For instance: From the 6th grade math Ohio Achievement Test: 24) What is the largest number that divides both 12 and 30 evenly? A. 2 B. 3 C. 6 D. 12 At first, it seems curious that the answers and the question are identical. However, 1) there aren’t many ways to phrase that question. 2) 12 and 30 seem like a reasonable/regular selection for the question. Probably a standard example from class. 3) Once you have the two numbers for the question, the possible answer set becomes limited. A lot of these questions are similarly structured because there isn’t an infinite variety of methods to rephrase them I have greater concern for the question on the cover of the DDN “23. Simplify 9+3+6x5 A)5 B)6 C)33 D)45” (the answer should be 42, but it’s not available) Additionally, the B E V E R L Y question doesn’t have a correct answer (3/8), just A)1/2 B)2/5 C)1/7 D)2/7By tuesya
February 4, 2007 6:57 AM | Link to this
Consider the following Question: Aneyshia reduced her soda pop intake from 12 ounces to 4 ounces. What will happen to the volume of the soda pop can? The correct answer according to my children - the volume of the soda pop can stays the same - it is the volume of the soda pop consumed that changes.